Halo (franchise)

Halo is a military science fiction video game series and media franchise, originally developed by Bungie and currently managed and developed by Halo Studios (previously 343 Industries), part of Microsoft's Xbox Game Studios. The series launched in November 2001 with the first-person shooter video game Halo: Combat Evolved and its tie-in novel, The Fall of Reach. The latest major installment, Halo Infinite, was released in 2021. Spinoffs include real-time strategy and twin-stick shooter games.

Bungie began as a developer of computer games for the Macintosh platform, making games including Marathon 2: Durandal. After the company was acquired by Microsoft in 2000, their in-progress game, which started life as a real-time strategy game, became Halo: Combat Evolved, a first-person shooter exclusive to Microsoft's Xbox video game console. Following the success of Halo, Bungie developed additional Halo sequels before and after regaining its independence from Microsoft in 2007. Microsoft established 343 Industries to oversee Halo going forward, producing games itself and in partnership with other studios.

Halo: Combat Evolved was the Xbox's flagship "killer app" and cemented Microsoft as a major competitor in the video game console space, and its sequels pioneered online matchmaking, social features, and video game marketing. The games have sold more than 81 million copies worldwide. With more than $6 billion in franchise sales, Halo is one of the highest-grossing media franchises of all time, spanning novels, graphic novels, comic books, short films, animated films, feature films, fan-made short machinima animations and other licensed products.

Millions of years ago, a powerful interstellar species known as the Precursors seeded the galaxy with life. One of their created races, known as the Forerunners, attacked their former masters and drove the Precursors into near extinction. A few Precursors turned into a dust, intending to regenerate themselves in the future. This dust became defective, infecting and contorting organisms into a new parasitic species, connected by a hivemind: the Flood. Spacefaring ancient humanity, fighting the Flood, also came into conflict with the Forerunners. After defeating humanity, the Forerunners reduced humanity's technology and species to a primitive level, while they concentrated on the threat of the Flood. The Forerunners conceived the Halo Array—ring-shaped megastructures and weapons of last resort that would destroy all sentient life in the galaxy to stop the Flood's spread. The array could be activated from the Ark, a repository of sentient life outside the range of the Halos. Exhausting all other options, the Array was activated, ending the Flood outbreak. The surviving Forerunners reseeded life and left the Milky Way galaxy.

Nearly a hundred thousand years later, in the 26th century, humanity—under the auspices of the Unified Earth Government, or UEG, and their United Nations Space Command, or UNSC—colonizes many worlds thanks to the development of faster-than-light "slipstream space" (i.e., hyperspace) travel. Tensions between the government and colonies desiring independence sparks violence. The UNSC's Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) creates the SPARTAN-II Project to create an elite group of enhanced supersoldiers to suppress the rebellions. In the year 2525, human worlds come under attack by a theocratic alliance of alien races known as the Covenant, whose leadership declares humanity an affront to their gods, the Forerunners. The Covenant begin a genocidal holy war. Their superior technology and numbers prove to be decisive advantages; although effective, the Spartans are too few to turn the tide of battle in humanity's favor. After the Covenant invaded Reach in 2552, the UNSC's last major stronghold besides Earth, Master Chief John-117 was left as one of the few remaining Spartans.

The rediscovery of the Halo rings prompts a desperate battle against the Covenant, who believe they are instruments of transcendence, not destruction. Master Chief and his artificial intelligence Cortana are instrumental in the destruction of a Halo ring to stop the Covenant and the threat of the Flood. Turmoil within the Covenant and the revelation of the Halo Array's true purpose leads to the Covenant splintering into civil war. The disgraced former Covenant commander known as the Arbiter, along with many of his species, helps the humans stop the Covenant leadership from activating the Halo Array via the Ark. The Human-Covenant War ends.

In the post-war era, the UNSC trains a new generation of Spartans, and tensions between the UNSC and rebels resumes. The Master Chief and Cortana accidentally free the Forerunner commander Didact and he briefly returns to assert supremacy over humanity. Master Chief and Cortana halt his plans, although Cortana is initially believed dead in the attempt. Cortana's survival through the Domain leads her to break with the UNSC and assert a new hegemony over the galaxy, with artificial intelligence (the "Created") in control. After two years of a scattered war between Cortana and the UNSC, Cortana attacks the Banished, a mercenary organization of former Covenant races. The Banished win the resultant conflict, terminating Cortana and battling the UNSC for control of Zeta Halo.

Video game studio Bungie was founded in 1991 by Alex Seropian in Chicago, Illinois, who partnered with programmer Jason Jones the following year to market and release Jones' game Minotaur: The Labyrinths of Crete. Focusing on the Mac game market because it was smaller and easier to compete, Bungie became a preeminent game developer on the platform, releasing the successful Myth and Marathon. Bungie began development on a new game in 1998, referring to it by the temporary code names "Monkey Nuts" and later "Blam!" after Jones could not bring himself to say the previous codename to his mother. "Blam!" was conceived as a science fiction real-time strategy game and took place on a hollowed-out world called Solipsis. The planet eventually became a ringworld called "Halo", in turn giving the game its title.